


Love Hurts

by Karasuno Volleygays (ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor)



Series: UshiOi Month [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Artist/Writer Oikawa, Boys Are Dumb, M/M, Misunderstandings, Writer Ushijima, same high school au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 07:37:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19436896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor/pseuds/Karasuno%20Volleygays
Summary: With his creative writing story being tapped for publication by the school, Ushijima found himself saddled with a noisy and opinionated consultant from the art class in the form of Oikawa Tooru. Setting out on a creative journey together, Ushijima found himself learning about his character through his own painful experiences.





	Love Hurts

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to GSNK for cementing the name Mamiko into my brain forever as a go-to term for a hapless heroine.

_ Wisps of cherry blossom petals embraced the breeze as Mamiko  _ —

Ushijima frowned at the page, at the ghastly purple prose mocking him. ‘Work on scene setting,’ Washijou-sensei had said after reviewing a handful of his previous drafts for the school’s annual publication of short stories. ‘Make every element of the tale as strong as it can be, and the plot will do the rest.’

It was sound advice in theory, but Ushijima couldn’t help but think that power had to be tempered at least in part by some modicum of finesse. A story couldn’t truly take hold until the reader figured it out for themselves. So clubbing them over the head with worldbuilding would just be distracting. 

He scribbled out the previous line and started again. 

Three days later, Ushijima had a draft for the story, and it was the day to turn it in for publication screening and editing. He was confident that the story itself was strong and robust and lively. He had no idea what Washijou meant when he said that was what he wanted, but he did as he was told. Every element was indeed bold. 

Minus some editing, it was his best work. After six years or so of creative writing, it had taken a long time for him to look at something and know for sure it was the best of the lot. He had no doubts about that anymore.

He stared at his desk two days later, stymied as to why Washijou slapped his printed draft down on the desk with more red pen on it than actual printer ink. Page after page was doused in the color of failure, and something itchy and unfamiliar roiled in his gut when he got to the last sheet of paper, complete with a sticky note with a simple  _ See me after class. _

Ushijima Wakatoshi generally thought of himself as confident and purposeful, but he was neither while he was staring at his books on his desk, which certainly would not transport themselves into his backpack.

Washijou saved him the trip, perching himself on the desktop to Ushijima’s right, arms crossed and nose turned up. “You know what you did?”

Taking a deep breath, Ushijima carded through the pages of corrections and took in the huge swaths of critique for the tenth time that day. “Tense problems, punctuation, and dialogue issues, I suppose.”

Shaking his head, Washijou’s lip curled with what may have been a smile or a frown. Ushijima never could figure out which was which. “That’s a given. I mean, do you know why you’re here and nobody else is?”

Ushijima stared blankly, and what he could certainly classify as a smile bloomed on Washijou’s face. “It means yours is the only one I’m going to publish this year.”

Jaw hanging slack, Ushijima forced himself to sit up straighter and cultivate a more serious demeanor. “The only one?”

“It has the length, the strength, and the spirit to stand on its own, and if I want to show off the best Shiratorizawa High School has to offer in its creative writing department, this is it.” Washijou crossed his arms and gave a curt bob of the head. “We just need to add some flair to it.”

Before Ushijima could inquire as to what that meant, someone he recognized from homeroom whisked through the door, hair a defiant mess of artful chaos while the rest of him danced through the door like he was listening to music that wasn’t actually there.

“Oikawa-kun, that will be enough.” Washijou nudged the desk directly in front of Ushijima with the toe of his slipper and said, “Take a seat.”

It was then that Ushijima noticed the well-worn sketchbook tucked under Oikawa’s arm, and he thought he might know what Washijou meant by adding flare. If he searched far and wide, he didn’t think he would ever unearth someone with more of that than Oikawa, and they had never even spoken to one another before.

Without preamble, Ushijima started to rattle off the finer points of the story — the characters, the plot, the time period, the weather, and then some. He was about to embark on a list of the main character’s physical attributes when Oikawa waved him off and chuckled. “Oh, we’ll do that later.”

Oikawa crossed his arms atop his sketchbook and leaned toward Ushijima. “I can get that stuff from the story draft. What I  _ need _ is to paint a picture of the author.”

“I beg your pardon?” For the third time that day, Ushijima found himself uncomfortably stymied. Finally flipping open his sketchpad, Oikawa’s pencil danced its way over the blank page until a rough scene was laid out. When he saw it, however, his lips pulled into a tight frown. “I don’t look like that.”

Ushijima looked at Washijou in askance, but his creative writing teacher was already ambling back to his desk, hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers. 

“Oh, you definitely look like that, Ushiwaka-chan.” A slender finger poked Ushijima with surprising force in the center of his sternum. “I’m not just here to doodle for your story. I’m here to make you learn how to make all the pieces work as a whole.”

Leaning back in his chair and certainly not ready to admit that he probably had a minuscule bruise on his chest, Ushijima stuck his nose in the air and fixed his best glare (for which he had plenty of skill, according to his friends). “You’re an art student. This is writing. I don’t see how you could possibly instruct me on something you’re not even qualified to have an opinion about.”

Oikawa let out a laugh that was far from amused. “Oh, Ushiwaka-chan —”

“And don’t call me that.”

“— it’s adorable that you don’t know how much you don’t know.”

On cue, Washijou dropped a graphic novel onto the desk in front of Ushijima. It was some science fiction thing, full of robots and spacecraft and so, so many aliens. “What is this?” Ushijima’s eyes scanned the cover, and he inhaled sharply when he happened upon the author’s name beneath the title. “Oh.”

So this Oikawa was not only an artist, he was apparently a storyteller, to boot. “My apologies. I see you might have some useful knowledge after all.”

Oikawa’s nose wrinkled. “First off, I have to say. If your dialogue is anything like that dull wooden casket of a vocabulary you have, you’re going to need a lot more help than I thought.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my vocabulary.” Ushijima found himself bristling over something he could not have possibly cared less about only moments before. “Plenty of people use words above a second grade level. I suggest you read some real books and see whose word choices are deficient.”

Just then, Ushijima spied a pair of dark eyes peering through the windows, hair even wilder than Oikawa’s haloed by sunlight. If his memory served him correctly, his name was Iwaizumi and he was on the baseball team. 

“Oh, man, I should be recording this,” came the muffled comment, wrought with amusement.

Washijou’s attention went straight over to the interloper, and with a few long strides, he reached the windows and yanked the blinds shut with a  _ snap _ . The old man grumbled something under his breath that Ushijima didn’t care to hear in detail, if the bits he could make out were any indication. 

Oikawa interrupted his reverie with a well-placed kick to the shin. “We have an obscene amount of work to do, so pay attention.”

The comment rankled, but Ushijima grit his teeth and played along. However, feigning his attention span didn’t last long, not when he really began to hear the elements of fiction that Oikawa picked up that honestly had never even crossed Ushijima’s mind while writing. 

“So the symbolism of this spring day being a shoujo manga stereotype, is there a reason for that?” Oikawa’s fingers drummed on the desk. “If there is, you might want to show that a little more. Unless you want people to think you wouldn’t know metaphor if it hit you in your big fat head.”

From his desk, Washijou chortled before forcing a cough to conceal his amusement. 

Ushijima crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “What does it matter? It communicates the atmosphere, as well as things that draw Mamiko’s attention.”

Slender fingers pull roughly on mussed hair. “I have a feeling only one of us is going to live through this project,” Oikawa muttered. WIth a sigh, he elaborated, “I don’t deny that. You just need to pick literally any other way to describe it or every person who reads this book will think you didn’t write the story and that you let your little sister do it for you.”

“I don’t have a sister.” 

“That’s not the point!” Oikawa held up the draft in front of him and thrust it under Ushijima’s nose. “If you want people to read one thing written by you and decide you’re some half-baked cookie-cutter writer, that’s fine with me. But if you want to take this seriously. . .” His lips curled into a cheshire cat grin. “You have to do everything I say forever.”

“No.”

“For a month?”

“No.”

“A week then.”

Ushijima closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “You are the most irritating person I’ve ever met.”

Oikawa flicked the tip of Ushijima’s nose. “Good. Now let’s get to work.”

  
  


And work, they did. Once Ushijima got past his natural reflex to strangle his partner, he started to piece together the little nuggets of observation Oikawa imparted. From word choice to sentence structure, Ushijima quickly identified the weak spots in his writing on his own in just a few days. Oikawa even pretended to weep when Ushijima took his draft home and combed over the whole thing for stylistic improvements.

After a week and a half, Oikawa finally pronounced the draft as ‘passable’, and the issue of completing the project surfaced.

“Okay, so I was thinking we could do one of two things.” Oikawa flipped through his sketchbook to a page littered with little doodles that were certainly from Ushijima’s story. “I could do a small illustration of an important development at the beginning of each chapter, kind of like Harry Potter. Or we could select important scenes throughout the book, maybe five or six, and I can do full page illustrations for it.”

Ushijima’s brows knit in thought. “I didn’t think of that. Which do you prefer?”

“Chapter illustrations,” Oikawa said without hesitation. “Gotta remind people once every ten to twenty pages why they’re still reading your atrocious writing.” 

Ushijima didn’t flinch at the jibe. “I agree. It seems to be the best way to build a sense of anticipation for the upcoming material.”

“And you still talk like a computer. Stop it.” Oikawa slapped Ushijima’s cheek with his pencil. “Do you want to pick the chapter images, or do you want me to surprise you?”

Swallowing his natural reflex to balk from giving up any element of creative control, Ushijima nodded. “You have a good eye. Let me know what you pick, but I’m sure it will be fine.”

A smile Ushijima might have categorized as wicked spread across Oikawa’s lips. “This should be fun.”

However, the smirk dropped in a second when Ushijima chuckled into his hand. “You’re very . . . vibrant.”

Ushijima’s belly roiled with a surge of something unfamiliar and itchy and weird at the tinge of red on Oikawa’s cheeks. It remained long after Oikawa whisked out of the room, humming a tuneless melody. He had no idea what it meant, but it didn’t take a genius to deduce the cause.

There was something about Oikawa Tooru that stirred him, and Ushijima had no idea what to do with that information.

Their daily collaborations were an exercise in navigating strange waters for Ushijima. With each casual touch (and Oikawa was a very handsy person, to boot), Ushijima had to scrape his thoughts back together, and he wasn’t sure how they were going to finish in time if he couldn’t hold up his end of the bargain.

The constant lapses did not go unnoticed, either. After school let out and Ushijima hustled to Washijou’s classroom, his teacher was sitting on the edge of his desk, arms crossed and mouth turned down into a frown that was dire even for him. Ushijima had seen that look aimed at other students before, but it was the first time he was on the receiving end. “Sensei?”

“Sit down.” Ushijima didn’t hesitate to obey the snappish command. “Did I make a mistake in choosing you, young man?”

Ushijima’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“I picked your story because it was the best and so were you.” Washijou shook his head and grumbled under his breath. “But we’re less than a week from when we’re scheduled to send the final draft to the printers, and one of my contributors is not remotely ready for it.”

Opening his mouth to ask which one of them it was, Ushijima’s jaw snapped shut because he knew Washijou meant him and his utter lack of focus. Oikawa’s chapter illustrations and cover design had been finished a few days before with Washijou’s approval, but red pen still scattered the pages of Ushijima’s well worn manuscript — first his own, then Oikawa’s, and then finally Washijou’s. 

Sucking in a fortifying breath, Ushijima stood up straight before dropping into the stiffest, most formal bow he could muster. “My apologies, sensei. I’ll be done by the deadline.”

“I thought you would say that.” Washijou gave him a curt nod. “Get to work. Oikawa-kun will be a little late today, so you’re on your own for a while.”

Ushijima nearly sighed in relief at the knowledge his greatest distraction would not hamper his ability to think at this critical time. However, as he stared at the all-too-familiar notes plastered in the margins of his draft, Ushijima almost turned to Oikawa to ask him about it, only to remember that he was alone save for Washijou plowing through a stack of papers on his desk. 

_ Make Mamiko’s thoughts and feelings come out by her actions, not her words. She doesn’t come across as melancholy at all. She sounds more like a computer droning out words. _

It was almost the exact same thing Oikawa had told him three weeks before about his dialogue.  _ The last thing a normal person does is talk about their feelings _ , Oikawa had noted about the main character’s reaction to being heartbroken and alone.  _ Only movie villains monologue about their issues. _

The more he pondered the textual quandary, the more Ushijima realized that both Washijou and Oikawa were correct. Ushijima’s problem was that he wasn’t actually sure how to do it. What  _ did _ someone think and feel when they were grief-stricken. While he was no stranger to competition and the concepts of winning and losing, he didn’t think the analogy of winning and losing debate tournaments could quite compare to a loss in love.

And no matter how many times he tried, Ushijima could never conjure the words to evoke a feeling he didn’t understand. His forehead dropped onto his arm on the desk, where Oikawa found him almost an hour later.

“Ushiwaka?” A gentle hand dropped on Ushijima’s shoulder. “Are you sick?”

“No,” Ushijima grumbled into his sleeve.

“Are you tired?”

“No.” Well, perhaps somewhat, but not in the way Oikawa was suggesting.

“Are you lost?”

Ushijima didn’t answer that, which was all the response Oikawa needed to gauge his mood. “Ah, you’re still struggling with the Mamiko factor.”

“I am.” Ushijima folded his arms under his chin and glared at the paper in front of him without taking in a single word. “How do you make someone feel something you don’t know anything about?”

A swift slap dropped on the crown of Ushijima’s head, and when he sat upright to take Oikawa to task for it, he stopped. Not because he didn’t want to defend himself, but because Oikawa gave him  _ that _ smile. Ushijima didn’t like that smile, the one where Oikawa showed he knew something Ushijima didn’t and had no problem rubbing it in.

“Stupid Ushiwaka-chan.” Oikawa sat backwards in the desk in front of Ushijima. “Have you considered, oh I don’t know,  _ asking _ someone who does?”

Frowning, Ushijima shook his head. “I don’t know anyone who’s been heartbroken before.”

Oikawa closed his eyes and sighed. “Of course you have, Bakawaka-chan. Did you forget that people get heartbroken over stuff that isn’t gooey romance stuff?”

Ushijima’s back straightened and he blinked at Oikawa. “What?”

Throwing a hand dramatically toward the horizon past the windows, Oikawa said, “Put yourself in her shoes. Mamiko is upset because someone she thought cared about her was actually a giant creep, right?” Ushijima nodded. “She’s heartbroken because she thought she had something special that she didn’t, and having it snatched away gave her feelings she didn’t like. Fear that nobody wants her, fear of inferiority, fear of the future because she literally cannot think of anything past this moment. 

“Now tell me to my face that you don’t know a single person who’s felt like that, even if you somehow haven’t.” Oikawa crossed his arms and quirked a brow, awaiting a response Ushijima was ill equipped to deliver. “You know what you need. Now all you have to do is find it.”

With that, Oikawa slid out of his seat and headed for the exit, his work on the project already complete save for his interest in Ushijima’s improvement. 

Oikawa had come just for him. Not because he was told to or because he had anything else he was required to do. Ushijima scoured his brain and came up empty when he tried to think of a time when anyone else had done something solely for his sake. He couldn’t, at least not in his conscious memory. 

Ushijima scrambled to stuff his materials into his bag without irreparably mangling them and dashed after his partner, ignoring Washijou’s barked command to get back to work. Oikawa was almost to the stairwell leading to the main floor when Ushijima skidded to a halt in front of him, slippers sliding across the smooth tile in a controlled skid. “Wait.”

“Don’t you have work to do, Waka-chan?” Oikawa gave Ushijima a plastic smile, fake in every way except for the shape. “I really need to go now.” 

Ushijima bowed his head and closed his eyes. “Give me one minute.”

“Fine.” When Ushijima straightened, a leer replaced the uncomfortable grin from before. “It’s about time you acknowledged me as your lord and savior.” 

Ignoring the barb, Ushijima took a deep breath. “I know you didn’t have to come today, but thank you for doing it anyway.”

Oikawa chuckled. “Now I’m curious what you intend to do with your last fifty seconds.”

A month ago, perhaps even a week, Ushijima would have bristled at those words, but not that day. Not when he was on the cusp of grasping something he had never touched before. Even as a writer, he could not find the words to articulate the tingling in his fingertips when they drifted up to slide softly down the line of Oikawa’s jaw. He had no turn of phrase for the way his belly felt full and empty all at once when Oikawa’s eyes widened in understanding, sagging against the hallway wall as he did so.

There certainly wasn’t a way to describe how loud all of those were at once and then some when Oikawa’s lips met his halfway. 

Ushijima’s fingers threaded with Oikawa’s, slowly pushing them up the wall until they were trapped over both their heads, their chests pressed together by the motion. The five or six centimeter difference in their heights gave Oikawa the perfect chance to arch into him and snare his lips for a breath-stealing kiss.

They were both gasping when Oikawa wrenched away, lips blushing an attractive scarlet color as they fixed him with an expression Ushijima’s limited ability to read him could not identify. “Twenty seconds.”

“I —” There were no words in Ushijima’s vocabulary to explain why he did that, and just as few which could demand an explanation for Oikawa’s very willing participation in that act of sheer impulse. “Thank you for making me a better writer.”

Oikawa chortled and rolled his eyes. “You were always a good writer. Just not as good as me.” 

Ushijima bit back a laugh. “Whatever you say.” He inclined his head one more time and backed away. “I’ll see you later then.”

“Yeah.” Oikawa sidestepped toward the stairs, gawking at Ushijima until he nearly found his way to the bottom of the stairs in a less than graceful fashion. “I really have to get back to detention now before the old lady notices I’m gone.”

“What?”

“Later!” Oikawa dashed down the stairs and out of sight in a few short seconds, leaving Ushijima with more questions than he started out with.

The one matter that had been solved was that Ushijima had a pretty good idea why his insides threw a tantrum every time he saw or even thought about Oikawa. Much like his hapless heroine, Ushijima found himself falling for the brightest star in any night sky and without any idea what to do about it other than count the minutes until they met again.

Back in the classroom, Washijou put down his pen once he saw Ushijima. Instead of emanating irritation at his commands being ignored, Washijou stared at him in question. “So?”

“What?” Ushijima dropped himself onto his desk and then his bag. “Why was Oikawa in detention?”

“Why is he ever?” Washijou quirked a grizzled brow. “He sleeps through my class almost every day. I gave him the option of regular detention or staying here and helping you. He opted for the latter.”

The matter apparently settled, Washijou resumed his work as if Ushijima’s entire lunch didn’t threaten to crawl its way back up his throat.

Bag untouched, Ushijima stared straight at the whiteboard in the front of the room. If he looked away, he was sure the room would tilt and make his angry stomach empty itself quickly and violently.

An unfamiliar flare of humiliation burned on his cheeks. Oikawa didn’t care about him; he had merely chosen the least obnoxious punishment available. And Ushijima sat there with his lips still wet from kissing Oikawa, who was probably enjoying his vacation from working with Ushijima, if his desire to go back to his regularly scheduled discipline was any indication.

His mindset utterly destroyed, Ushijima left early against Washijou’s objections and went straight to bed the moment he got home. Sleep, however, was nowhere on the menu. 

Ushijima dwelled on the same concept for hours before he finally drifted off to sleep. How one was supposed to feel at the thought of their presence being only marginally better than detention, he had no idea. He knew what he felt at the moment, though. 

So this was heartbreak — an odd sensation, a combination of pins and needles and brewing stomach acid and weariness and nausea. Ushijima didn’t like it at all, but for the first time in his life, he thought he could understand it. 

It was three in the morning when he awakened to rustle through his bag for his manuscript. Ushijima flipped through page after page, scribbling notes over the text at lightning speed. Once he pushed through cover to cover, he pulled out his laptop to queue up the story’s Word document and got to work. The sun had long risen before there was a knock on his door.

After he gave a grunt of something resembling ‘come in’, the housekeeper Reina peeked inside and gave him a frown. “Wakatoshi-san, you missed your bus for school.”

“I know.” He had been vaguely aware of the time, but he had also been aware that he didn’t care. Words flowed freely from his flying fingers, overwriting his staid and naive words from before, replacing them with a raw wound still bleeding Oikawa Tooru.

It was well past noon and a concerned plate of sandwiches before Wakatoshi bothered leaving his desk chair. Hair wild and unwashed, he lurched through the house to grab a carton of iced coffee from the refrigerator, Reina’s gasps of shock of no consequence as he drained half of it in one long drag straight from the carton.

Wiping the back of his mouth with the collar of his well worn t-shirt, Ushijima frowned and muttered, “I need chocolate.” With that, he rummaged through the pantry in search of whatever artificially flavored happiness he could find. His search did not bear much fruit due to his mother’s strict dietary opinions, but he did manage to scrounge some candy melt chocolate, an expired box of Pocky, and a few more cans of coffee to consume after the carton ran try.

Ushijima, wired on more caffeine than he could remember consuming his entire life, plowed through more and more of his manuscript, opting to rewrite entirely with the old draft and the new one side by side on the screen. 

WIth every paragraph, he gained a new understanding of what Washijou was trying to get him to do, what Oikawa had attempted to tell him. Every sign of Suzuki, Mamiko’s love interest, interacting with her, Ushijima could see Oikawa’s face in his mind’s eye, treating Mamiko — treating  _ Ushijima _ — like a plaything to be discarded once its shine had worn off.

It was nearly noon the next day before Ushijima’s coffee-fueled fountain of inspiration ended with him collapsing on his bed covers. It was finished, and it was probably the best work Ushijima had ever done as a writer. Before he passed out, he sent a copy of the document to Washijou for formatting. He did his part, for better or for worse. 

There would probably be hell to pay for skipping two days of school, but he had no previous record of poor behavior or truancy of any kind so it would be a simple matter to give a few half-truths to resolve it. Ushijima couldn’t even say he disliked the idea of fibbing about avoiding school to pour himself into his story rather than the lingering ache of self pity.

He fell into a dreamless sleep, undisturbed until the faint  _ click  _ of something hitting his window roused him from his almost deathlike sleep. Bleary eyes spied half past midnight on his alarm clock, and as his foggy vision cleared, a familiar face peered through his window. His second floor window.

Ushijima reacted on instinct, flinging the window open and dragging Oikawa inside before he fell from his perch in the old cherry tree and broke a limb or worse. The two of them landed in a heap on the floor, Oikawa sprawled across Ushijima’s chest.

Their gazes locked, and Ushijima struggled to discern the meaning of the way Oikawa was looking at him before he turned away in disgust. “Why are you here?”

“As if I’d let you skip two days of school without telling me all about it.” Oikawa blew a tuft of hair from his forehead and chuckled. “You’re extra grumpy today.”

The urge to retch mounting, Ushijima pushed Oikawa off of him and hissed, “Leave me alone.” He stomped over to his bedroom door and wrenched it open. “Use the door this time.”

Oikawa sank into Ushijima’s chair and slumped his shoulders, fingers drumming with agitation on his thighs. “I don’t understand. You seemed to like me well enough the other day.”

“That was before I knew what’s really going on.” 

Waiting for the words to make Oikawa flinch, Ushijima found himself disappointed at the blank stare of confusion instead. “At any given time, I have no idea how your weird robot brain works, but this is just genuinely confusing me. What are you even talking about?”

Ushijima closed the door and loomed over Oikawa, arms crossed and face firmly entrenched in a genuine frown. “You didn’t have to pretend to be interested, you know. All you had to say is you were stuck with me.”

“What are you — what?” Oikawa’s face was twisted in thought, which would be comical if it weren’t at Ushijima’s expense. 

Oikawa placed a hand on Ushijima’s arm, but Ushijima swatted it away. “Don’t.”

“Waka-chan . . .” Hurt quickly snapped into derision on Oikawa’s face, nose turned up. “Well if you’re going to be like that, then fine. You would write stupid love letters anyway.”

With that, Oikawa stormed out and slammed the door behind him. Long after he was gone, Ushijima stood in the middle of his room staring at the ceiling. His head ached and his stomach hurt. 

Finally, Ushijima’s attention drifted over to his unmade bed, contemplating sleeping off this strange malaise, but he shook off the idea. If he went to sleep, he doubted his unconscious would give him a moment’s rest. Instead, he drifted back over to his desk and powered on his laptop.

Once again, words poured onto the page, but these ones had nothing to do with the story he had written for school. No, this one was just for him.

Ushijima returned to school after his two day hiatus with minimal difficulty in explaining away his absence. Washijou gave him a strange look but didn’t mention the fact that the completed work was received while Ushijima was allegedly ‘ill’, which Ushijima appreciated. He respected his creative writing teacher, and he didn’t relish the idea of having to embellish his lie.

For someone Ushijima barely noticed before this project started, he couldn’t go anywhere without feeling Oikawa’s eyes on him. Here and there, he would catch Oikawa staring and turn away faster than Oikawa could. In the halls, in the courtyard, at the bus stop, and most noticeably at an assembly recognizing various students’ accomplishments and contributions to the school.

After all, it was hard to accept a ribbon of excellence for a collaboration without the other collaborator standing right next to him.

While the principal droned on about the values of creativity and service, Ushijima forced himself to stare straight ahead without casting so much as a glance at Oikawa, who did much of the same. 

The stalemate dragged on for over a month, but it came to an abrupt end when Washijou asked him to stay after school for a meeting. He nearly turned around and left when he saw Oikawa sitting atop the desk at the front of the class, feet swinging cheerily as his legs dangled from the front.

They wound to a stop as soon as Ushijima crossed the threshold.

“Waka-chan,” Oikawa muttered with a pout, chin in the air as he looked down his nose at Ushijima from his perch. 

“Oikawa,” Ushijima replied flatly. “You wanted to see me, sensei?”

Washijou nodded. “The books came back from the printer, and I wanted to give you each a copy to take home before the general sales start.” He held the books out, and they both reached out to accept them with something dangerously resembling trepidation.

As far as he was aware, Ushijima didn’t think Oikawa ever got to read the final draft of the story. He had seen the flatter version without the last minute revisions several times, but Ushijima’s pain-streaked prose that made it to print was probably new to him.

It was personal enough that Ushijima nearly snatched Oikawa’s copy out of his hands.

“Thank you, sensei.” Ushijima bowed and took a seat, eyes glued to the white board. He could feel the occasional glance Oikawa shot his way when he thought Ushijima wasn’t looking. However, Ushijima didn’t need to look when every nerve in his body was attuned to Oikawa’s very presence. 

Washijou spat out a plethora of things to do with distribution, timeframes, sellers, and fund allocation. None of it penetrated Ushijima’s brain, so he scribbled down every word so he could let it soak in later when his entire skin wasn’t full of Oikawa.

The moment Washijou stopped talking, Ushijima took his leave. Grateful for the laptop in his bag, he fled the building in favor of a far corner of the grounds where a gnarled old tree’s knotted roots crept out of the soil. Most of the students avoided it because of the lumpy ground, but Ushijima appreciated its dense shade and sweet-smelling trunk. 

Awash with a fresh wave of raw emotion rushing through his bloodstream, Ushijima wrote and wrote. Each word was plucked from his chest, full of feelings he neither understood nor wanted, and this was the only way he could process them.

It was almost dark before Ushijima realized the time, followed shortly by a rumbling stomach and a gaping yawn. He had woken up early yet again to while away his restlessness with words. The first draft of the story itself was nearly finished. Whether he was going to edit it for quality, Ushijima didn’t know. 

He did know one thing: he would never give Oikawa the satisfaction of reading it. 

The sun had set by the time Ushijima made it to his front door, key finding the bolt on reflex alone. His mother and grandmother were absent, likely in bed at this hour, so without a ‘tadaima’, Ushijima toed off his shoes and lumped up the stairs.

His curtains fluttered in a soft breeze coming from the window Ushijima had left closed before he headed out that morning. The air carried a hint of a very familiar cologne, almost too sweet but just right on its owner — and there was no mistaking who that was.

“Oikawa, why are you in my house? Again.” Ushijima’s voice was flat. He didn’t have the energy to summon the hostility he would’ve done had he been more awake. 

Arms crossed, Oikawa huffed and stuck his nose in the air. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting here? You are the rudest person ever, Waka-chan!”

“Says the one person in the room committing a felony.” Ushijima’s eyes fell upon the familiar volume tucked under Oikawa’s arm and steeled his jaw for the fallout. “What do you want?”

“The truth.” Oikawa took the book and waved it under Wakatoshi’s nose. “When did you figure out how to write like this?”

Ushijima shrugged and turned to inspect the scintillating silhouette of his average desk lamp. “You know where.”

Oikawa shot him an irritated look before rifling through the pages, settling somewhere near the end of the book. “ _A cold tendril of ache snaked its way around Mamiko’s chest,_ ” he read. “ _It squeezed until she could barely remember what it was like to breathe._

“So this was what it feels like to lose everything _ , she mused. Spelling bees and bus schedules and homework were all things she had failed at in her nineteen years of life. Some might even call her failures in those arenas prolific in their quantity. _

_ “But none of them could claw at her spirit and leave her will bleeding in the aftermath. Love really did hurt, but nothing in the world could keep Mamiko from wanting to feel it again. A slice of paradise never was enough to sustain a hungry, weary traveler. And this was a hunger much better shared. _ ”

Sighing, Ushijima clenched his fists at his side. “You don’t need to read it to me. I did write it, after all.”

The room was silent, and Ushijima almost thought that Oikawa managed to leave somehow. That theory was shattered when familiar, dexterous fingers wrapped around his jawline and wrenched him around. “Now you listen carefully, and make sure every word of this soaks through your thick Godzilla skull.”

Ushijima nodded wide-eyed in Oikawa’s grip.

“Do you think it would really take me almost a month to draw a handful of sketches?” When Ushijima’s brow furrowed in confusion, Oikawa harrumphed. “As if you would know, but still. I could sketch a chapter image sized thing in, like, ten minutes. I did ten sketches and a few full sized illustrations. That’s two weeks tops. After the project was done, I was free to leave, but I didn’t.”

The muscles in Ushijima’s jaw fretted against Oikawa’s palm, and his knees were dangerously numb beneath him. “Oh.”

“Oh.” Oikawa flicked Ushijima’s forehead and puffed a wisp of hair from his eyes with a huff. “Pretty conceited of you to assume I’d subject myself to your presence for any other reason than my dumb little instinct monkey brain.” Reeling away, Oikawa thrust his fingers into his hair and growled at the ceiling. “This is so much easier to read and write about than it is to do. Who writes this trash, anyway?”

A laugh tickled at the back of Ushijima’s throat. “We do, apparently.”

Oikawa guffawed and flung himself against Ushijima’s chest, their breath mingling as they finally looked at each other —  _ really  _ looked at each other — for the first time in weeks. “I’m going to say this bluntly so that dumb dictionary you call a brain knows exactly what I’m getting at.

“I worked with you because I had to. I stayed around after because I wanted to. Now kiss me, you ridiculous giant. You have a few weeks’ worth of avoiding me to make up for.”

Something in Ushijima’s gut twisted into a knot. He wasn’t sure if it was a good feeling or a bad one, but after weeks of stewing over his feelings of being used as a convenient distraction, it was almost a relief for something else to take over.

Perhaps Oikawa was correct and Ushijima had been melodramatic over the whole thing. But for the first time, he had gained true insight into the phenomenon that powered a bulk of all media entertainment. Songs, films, plays, art, books, and many more told the story of love across millions of different pockets of universe but always carried that same undercurrent.

And as Ushijima crushed his lips against Oikawa’s like it was his last day on earth, he finally realized he was in a tiny universe of his own. Just him and Oikawa, and everything else seemed far away.


End file.
